


someday, all the stars

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 15:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19298302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: If they could have the run of a plane, see all the stars, as if they were floating in the air--someday.





	someday, all the stars

**Author's Note:**

> prompt was 'all the stars'
> 
> for dw user novocaine_sea
> 
> a futurefic

The hum of jet engines bothers some people, and it fades into the background for others. Kise hears it, up in the air above the clouds, because he’s listening for it, the comforting drone that’s become so familiar in the past few years. It’s almost as much a part of the regular season as the basketball games, and as much so as the hectic sleep schedules, napping in a different time zone and sleeping on a hotel bed with a slightly lower thread count than your own sheets (picky, Kise knows, but if the team is shelling out as much as they are then they ought to get the absolute premium), shooting drills that Kise has mastered long ago but they still make him do. 

When Kise was in high school, he’d thought about becoming an airline pilot. It wasn’t a serious possibility; nothing other than basketball or possibly modeling had been (and even if he’d wanted it as something more than a glancing reflection off the surface of an idea, he didn’t have the grades or the particular diligence needed to do it). At the time, he hadn’t been on too many flights, that middle school trip to Hawaii, a couple of photoshoots and scattered family vacations--of course nothing like now, but not enough to qualify for the lowest level of frequent flyer. He knew nothing about flying planes, or how they worked, but it had seemed at least not boring. He would be in control; he would push the levers and buttons and delicately steer a whale-shaped jet across the sky, over oceans and continents.

(“You just want to wear the unform,” Aomine had said. “Or hook up with the hot flight attendants.”

“Are you volunteering for the job?” Kise had asked, and, well, imagining Aomine as a flight attendant had been both amusing and kind of hot.)

It’s easy to miss people on a plane, a cheap setting for deep thought and emotion in fiction, but one rooted in truth even though it’s sprouting all over the place. When the lights are dimmed and Kise’s teammates are in various positions, asleep or watching movies on their laptops, headphones in and pillows around their necks, and the coaches are crouched around clipboards in wrinkled suits, Kise feels pretty disconnected. It’s easier to feel the pull of the stars outside the window, so close and so bright, larger and more numerous than they appear from the ground in the light-overdosed nighttime cityscapes he spends his time in. 

Kise doesn’t know any of the constellations, other than the Big Dipper (can he see that from this side of the plane?) and the Southern Cross (wrong hemisphere). Everything else looks like nothing to him, things people had somehow memorized once upon a time as evoking concepts that Kise doesn’t really see. But whatever they do or don’t look like, everything is beautiful. It’s like the energy of the crowd when the arena lights are out and Kise’s about to run out of the locker room onto the court, the feeling of perfectly-worn-in sneakers against fresh wax. The plane is descending, circling; it will dip below the clouds soon enough, carry them to the foggy airport in Cleveland. Kise will slip into a cab, to Aomine’s familiar address, and they can look up through his window or go onto the roof of his building, but the clouds will hide the stars. It’s probably supposed to rain soon. This isn’t something Kise can share, something he can imitate or preserve, but he wants to, and that gap is always frustrating, in part because it’s rarely there for him. A voice, a joke, an expression, a basketball move, he can do. This, though is a little beyond him, and it makes him feel oddly small, insignificant compared to whatever-size the stars really are up close. Kise sighs. He doesn’t really want to look anymore, but--he looks back again, uneven patterns jumping out at him. Not really patterns, just the way the human brain is wired, but if Kise sees them they’re real enough.

He snaps a picture with his phone and sends it to Aomine.

* * *

Aomine’s awake when Kise gets to his place, scrolling through his phone on the living room couch in boxers and one of the t-shirts Kise had left here--last summer? or maybe on a road trip--cute, disheveled, and definitely ready to go to sleep. 

“You could help me with my bag,” Kise says from the doorway.

“Figured you’d need the extra strength training, what with how much you’re going to have to go up against me tomorrow,” says Aomine, not looking up from the phone. 

“Funny,” says Kise. “I thought you were just trying to avoid overexerting yourself for going against me.”

He drops his suitcase where he is; he can come back for it (or make Aomine carry it) later and makes his way over to the couch, leans over the back and places his mouth just centimeters away from Aomine’s. Aomine finally drags his face away from his screen and leans forward; Kise ducks out of the way just in time, and before Aomine can put on his most wounded expression leans back in to kiss him properly.

“Did you get my picture?”

“Yeah,” says Aomine. “Pretty.”

“We should fly somewhere together sometime,” says Kise. 

He walks around to the other side of the couch and deposits himself on Aomine’s lap.

“We have,” says Aomine. “World championships. That time we went to Barbados.”

(Yeah, okay, that had been good, a secluded hotel room, a quiet beach, the waves washing over them, Aomine’s kisses sticky and sweet from the fruity cocktails he’d had too many of and Kise could see it on his flushed face.)

“We should look at the stars,” says Kise. 

Aomine yawns. “We could do that here.”

“Not when it’s cloudy. Not with the light pollution.”

“I can take you to the mountains,” Aomine says. “We could go camping.”

Kise wrinkles his nose--Aomine’s offered this before, but ugh, bugs and worms and wildlife and dirt, no thanks.

“We could go flying,” says Kise. “Think about it.”

He leans his head against Aomine’s shoulder. If they could have the run of a plane, see all the stars, as if they were floating in the air--someday.


End file.
